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WhatsApp: A pain in the arse

By Juliano Andrade Spyer, on 4 January 2015

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Image courtesy of Josh Stocco, Creative Commons

It is not uncommon for the people of Balduino to discuss sex. Even my least talkative informants enjoyed telling me about their love affairs outside their official relationships. So it is not surprising that loads of sex clips circulated through my informant’s smart phones’ WhatsApp exchanges. Yet I did not understand that a trusted female informant – that agreed to share her personal communication with me – constantly forwarded me clips of heterosexual anal penetration.

Most of the videos she sent me depicting sex had in common one element: they were low budged videos that displayed painful anal sex penetration.

Since I cannot show you those clips because of the nature of the content, I will briefly describe what is particular about them.

One clip shows the moment the male actor mistakenly misses the actresses’ vagina and penetrates her anus abruptly. The video is edited comically using slow motion to depict the ferocious reaction of the woman as she breaks from that predictable porn performance and, screaming, begins to attack her partner on that scene. There are also clips in which the women try to hide the pain by screaming in as if she was having an orgasm.

All these videos indicate that the women are putting up with those scenes for reasons that are not related to pleasure. They accept it, most likely because they are being paid as porn actresses, but they do not like it.

Why would adult heterosexual women be sharing this kind of content if it is not because it turns them on – as it clearly doesn’t?

My informant and her friends laugh at these scenes. For them, it is humouring the only channel that allows this kind of subject to be brought up. Laughing about these videos is a way to talk about the sudden change in gender relations in the village.

It was only in the past two decades that most women there began having the opportunity of developing a career and becoming financially independent from their male partners.

Men are no longer needed as before to provide money and protection for the family. In fact, women have become better adapted to the formal job market; they have studied more and are more productive than men according to various sources I spoke with. This change raises discomfort among men.

An informant told me her partner took away her birth control pills when she refused having sex late in the night (as she had to work early in the morning) as a way to punish her. As a mother she would again have to stay home and accept her dependence on him. Looking from this angle, the sharing of these painful anal clips exposes how difficult it has been for women and for men to negotiate new roles.

The conclusion may seem too obvious; but showing painful anal penetration clips may be just a way of agreeing that the men in Balduino are a big pain in their arses.

 

Regulating the body in Chilean cyberspace

By ucsanha, on 22 September 2014

no desnudes

Last week, a friend here in Northern Chile posted on his Facebook wall a stylized drawing of a woman’s body with the words: “Don’t show your naked body on social networking sites. Gain the admiration and respect of your contacts and friends by showing your qualities as a person. What makes you sexy and beautiful is not your body, but your personality. Women and girls deserve respect.”

This was not the first time I had seen such a post. I have seen such memes circulating for several months, posted by grandmothers, mothers, and young men and women. But this post made me pause because my friend Miguel was the one who posted it. A few months into my fieldwork, Miguel was showing me a funny meme his friend had posted. As he scrolled down on his Facebook feed, he passed a post from Playboy Magazine that showed two women in bikinis. “Oh, those are my ugly cousins!” he joked. As he scrolled down there were several other posts from Playboy and he told me “My cousins post pictures of themselves a lot.”

Since the subject had been breached, he seemed to feel comfortable discussing semi-pornographic posts with me and I took advantage of the situation by continuing to ask questions. He told me all about “the new thing” of pictures of the underside of women’s breasts rather than their cleavage. He switched to Whatsapp and clicked a link a friend had sent him to demonstrate. There I saw “50 of the Best Underboob Shots on the Internet,” mostly taken selfie-style either in the mirror, or up one’s own shirt. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or confused.

With this previous discussion in mind, in which, quite openly he discussed how he enjoyed seeing overtly sexy pictures that women take of their bodies, it seemed strange that he would post such a meme chastising women for doing this very thing.

Of course, there is a big difference between the women who are likely the intended recipients of his message and the women who are displayed on Playboy’s Facebook page. That is: he expects his female friends to read his Facebook wall. He does not expect Playboy models, or even the women whose reverse cleavage pictures are floating around the internet to be his followers on Facebook. In essence, his Facebook activity is revealing of something anthropologists have long known; we treat friends and acquaintances differently than we treat strangers (for example see Simmel’s essay on The Stranger and our own blog about chatting to Strangers in China). In this case it is acceptable to objectify the bodies of strangers, but he hopes that the women he knows personally will not openly contribute to their own objectification.

In looking through my own female Facebook friends from Northern Chile, I don’t see any pictures that are overtly sexual and show body parts that one wouldn’t reveal on a hot summer day. However, in my “you might know…” suggestions, I do see several such profile pictures for accounts based in this city. Miguel, along with other friends—both male and female—assured me that these profiles were fake (see also controversies of fake profiles in India and Turkey). “They say they’re from here but I’ve never met any of these women. They’re definitely fake profiles.”

To me this suggests two related points about the ways the regulation of bodies and nudity are happening online. The first is simply that these “Don’t show your naked body” memes represent a way of surveilling and controlling what others do with their bodies. They use straw-women as a warning, suggesting that showing too much body on social media will result in people losing respect. This strategy seems to have worked as well. Young women in northern Chile shy away from showing their bodies in contexts connected to their public personality. Yet the pictures still appear in the form of anonymous or fake profiles. Using fake names and profile pictures, they still post faceless photos exposing body parts fit only for a very liberal beach.

While this in some ways may be seen as a victory for young women’s self-worth based on traits not connected to their sexuality or bodies’ likenesses to those featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the surveillance and judgment of their online activity represents another issue—regulation that denies young women agency over the representation of their own bodies. This is one thing when coming from mothers and aunts, but young men like Miguel present a double standard in which their social networking activity elevates the bodies of strangers—from swimsuit models to unknown women taking risqué selfies, while condemning their own peers for similar self-representations. It’s not hard to imagine then why fake profiles might be a good option for young women trying to find self esteem about their bodies and their own ways to fit into the world of social networking.

In the end, what this tells us about social networking sites in this context, is that they are still very closely connected to the body. The internet is not a haven for free-floating identity, disconnected from our physical form, but is a place where bodies may still be seen as a representation of an individual, may still be regulated, and may still be a site of agency or repression. Rather than actually showing the respect that “women and girls deserve,” these memes further regulate women. Much as catcalls on the street regulate women’s bodies in physical space, memes that tell women what is acceptable for their bodies do so in the space of the internet.

If you are interested in themes of surveillance and control, see also Caste Related Profiles on Facebook in India, Facebook and the Vulnerability of the Self and Love is… in Turkey, and Social Media and the Sense of Autonomy in Italy.

All in the pose

By Jolynna Sinanan, on 25 August 2014

Image courtesy of J.G.

Image courtesy of J.G.

Danny and I are in the midst of looking at hundreds of Facebook profiles and in his case, Twitter and Instagram feeds as well to start writing the first book to come out of the project so far, What They Post. The project has always intended to be an anthropology of social media, but as we presented at the Royal Anthropological Institute a couple of months ago, instead of studying social media, we can also see social media as an unprecedented opportunity to study the wider anthropological context.

This is the premise of the book we’re (or at least I’m) muddling through at the moment. By looking at visual posts on social media- photos and self-generated or collaborated images (memes etc.) we can see an alternate route to doing ethnography. We are comparing our two field sites, The Glades in the UK and El Mirador in Trinidad. We’re not comparing Trinidad to the UK, it would defeat the purpose to take the values and cosmology of one society as the bedrock to which all others are compared. In our study, the use of social media by the English looks just as ‘exotic’ as uses of social media in China, Turkey or India. By looking at what people post, we can demonstrate the contrast between Trinidadian and English posting as the best way of showing that posting is in many respects Trinidadian and English.

We have now looked at thousands of images posted on social media and are starting to work with about ten comparative themes. Some are directly taken from the content of images, such as counting how many times alcoholic drinks appear, either with people or images of drink alone. Others are bigger themes that have been more subject to academic study we have big question marks next to that will need deeper analysis, where an images says something about gender or class but we’re not sure what yet.

One of the themes that has stood out to us is the way that women pose in photos. Danny has noticed a pattern where women over the age of around 30, do not overtly pose. They may try to look pretty, attractive or feminine, but they don’t show their bodies in any particular way. Posing years seem to be for teenagers and young adults, but certainly not for adult women.

It is quite the opposite in Trinidad. Women of all ages post images of themselves on Facebook, they pose to the side, they show their behind, they may have a hand of their hip or a leg slightly turned out diagonally from the body, but they show themselves.

And this is where it is very important to not take the values of any one society as the cornerstone to compare others. We have all seen countless journalistic articles that feed into the anxieties we have with the introduction of any new media, usually from a psychological perspective. That social media encourages, or brings out latent narcissistic tendencies, that we are all obsessed with our own image and we are all become more exhibitionist, photographing and sharing everything that we do.

But when I ask women why they post photos of themselves, I get a number of responses like ‘I was in a good mood’, ‘I felt like it’, ‘I liked my make-up’ or ‘I liked how I looked that day’ followed by ‘and I wanted to remember it.’ Trinidad is a society where people strive to be seen and we can’t contextualise that desire in contexts of Western mediatisation or celebrity phenomenon. Because of its own history and experience of modernity, being seen is to be acknowledged that one exists as a person. Visibility has far more existentialist implications in Trinidad than simply wanting fame.

I would also argue that Trinidadian women are generally kinder to themselves and to each other about their bodies. You don’t have to have a certain look to post lots of selfies, young women aren’t ridiculed by their peers for posting selfies or posing in photos if they aren’t thin or pretty enough, they don’t need to look like celebrities to celebrate themselves. Trinidadian women generally have a healthier sense of body image than we have observed with their UK counterparts and it all comes across when we take a comparative look at the photos they post.

Harassment and social media

By Elisabetta Costa, on 6 August 2014

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

 

As soon as I arrived in my field site, I was told by my first informants that Facebook is often used to prove to other people that their life is happy, full of happy relationships and lived accordingly with moral codes, especially when these codes are not followed in ‘real’ life. I genuinely understood what meant last month when one of my closest friends, a 27 year old Kurdish woman who came to work in Mardin from a nearby city, told me this story: her landlord and friend started to flirt with her although he had already a wife and three children, and one secret lover with whom he was regularly seeing on the weekend when his wife was busy looking after the kids. The love of two women was not enough for him, and the man started to invite my friend late in the night, by sending her messages via SMS and WhatsApp. After three days of harassing invitations and receiving negative but polite answers from the girl, she blocked his phone number. Then the man started to call her from anonymous phone numbers; the girl stopped the second number too and the man stopped harassing her. After a couple of weeks, the man called my friend and ordered her to leave the house without giving her any explanation. In one week, she had to find a new flat and to move all her furniture and belongings into a new place. She was basically evicted from her house because she didn’t agree to have an affair with the landlord.

During those weeks I followed Facebook postings of the landlord who is my friend on Facebook, and I have been surprised to see the way he had completely changed his behaviour online. For the whole year, he posted pictures of holiday trips with friends, food and politics; and suddenly he started to post pictures of him with his wife and wrote romantic and sweet words about his love for her. For the whole month, he was only sharing pictures and poetry portraying his happy family life and his happy marriage.

Men who cheat on their wives and harass girls are defined as şerefsiz (men without honour) by people in my field-site; and being without honour is one of the most common and worst derogatory definitions given to men. As people here take Facebook quite seriously, this social media platform is used as an important tool to prevent others from negatively gossiping about them and to improve their respectability. The days after the girl didn’t agree to have an affair with him, the man’s main concern was to protect his reputation, to avoid the spreading of rumors about him, and to protect the relationship with his wife. And Facebook was the most appropriate tool to do it.

“Turks have no other friends besides the Turks” – a Turkish saying

By Elisabetta Costa, on 27 June 2014

Galatasary fans. (Photo: Federico Mera CC)

Galatasary fans. (Photo: Federico Mera CC)

My colleagues and friends around the world are talking a lot about the World Cup. I’ve been reading Italian and English newspapers and news about the World Cup dominates the front page. I often check my Facebook page and my friends from Italy, UK, France, North and South America, Lebanon have all been writing comments about it, even if their national football team isn’t playing. My memories of the last World Cup, when I was in Lebanon, are very clear. I was in Beirut in summer 2010 and I remember very well how Lebanese football fans were preparing themselves for the matches: flags everywhere, big screens in many cafés, people wearing team t-shirts, shouting in the street and singing to celebrate the victory of their favourite team (which was Brazil in most cases). In those days both men and women were continuously commenting the World Cup and they were cheering passionately. Lebanon is a post-colonial country and the way people were intensely following other country’s football teams had to do with the culturally legacy of their colonial history.

In contrast to Beirut and many other places in the world, in Mardin, none of my 200 Facebook friends has written a single comment about the World Cup. Men who are football enthusiasts watch the matches at home, but they do not passionately support any football team. They do not care about it. No flags, no clothes, no signs about the World Cup neither in public spaces, nor in the private. Almost nobody watches matches in cafes’ because the matches are available for free on the public TV channel TRT 1, and they are played late in the evening or at night local time. So people prefer to comfortably sit and watch them at home.

I couldn’t watch matches with locals because a woman can’t sit together with men late in the evening in a private house. And women do not care at all about football; a lot do not even know what the World Cup is. The only thing I could do was ask the reasons for the lack of interest, and in most cases it was simply seen as absolutely normal and natural, something that did not need any additional explanations. Others gave me technical justifications:

“This year the World Cup is boring; it doesn’t give any emotions!! Players are not playing well. Look at Italy for example, they are so boring. They wait for Balotelli to make a goal. This is not football. But other teams are not doing better, they are even worse!”

Someone else told me he was supporting Holland, Spain or Portugal for no reason in particular. Some boys who are usually interested in football were not aware of the existence of a World Cup, nor the existence of football played outside of Turkey. One 8 year old child exclaimed: “I am Galatasary’s fan, Galatasary will win!”. A male supporter of AKP (the current ruling party in Turkey) told me not to follow the World Cup because he disapproves of all the money involved in gambling, as it is forbidden in Islam. Another man in his mid-thirties who also supports AKP looked me in the eyes and with a very disclosing look and in a low voice said to me:

“Nobody will tell you the real reason why they are not interested in the World Cup because they can’t! And they do not want to hurt you! But people do not care about the World Cup because there is no countries close friend with Turkey involved in it. Who should we support? Should we support Holland or Portugal? Or Costa Rica? We do not even know where Costa Rica is. They are so far and different from us and they are not Muslim. If for example Azerbajan or other Muslim countries culturally close to us were playing we would have been much more involved, but this is not the case”.

In Mardin, the World Cup is followed as a form of private and individual entertainment. People do not express publicly support for one team or another not offline, nor on social media. Men watch football matches as they can watch a serial TV show, within their own homes and they do not discuss it publicly. In Mardin, the World Cup does not constitute a public arena where national and local collective identities are expressed and articulated. The reason of this has probably to do with the specificity of Turkish national identity, which is built on the idea of a singular Muslim nation that is under continual threat from foreign Western countries. Being a fan of a non-Muslim foreign football team is not something that is plausible here. I haven’t investigated the way the Kurds relate to football and nationalism, but the Arabs living in Mardin who consider themselves proud Turks are involved in many forms of Turkish Muslim nationalism. And not paying attention to the World Cup is one form.

One of my Arab friends, who is also a football fan, posted a picture of his favourite team, Galatasary, with a very touching poem dedicated to his favourite players on his Facebook wall the night before the start of the World Cup!

THE WORLD CUP ON SOCIAL MEDIA WORLDWIDE
This article is part of a special series of blog posts profiling how social media is affecting how ordinary people from communities across the planet experience the 2014 World Cup.

Visibility in the society pages of social media

By Jolynna Sinanan, on 19 March 2014

Photo by Jolynna Sinanan

Photo by Jolynna Sinanan

I have passed the 10 month point in fieldwork where I am perhaps getting a bit too comfortable with being in Trinidad. Like hundreds of thousands of Trinidadians this month, all my responsibilities and commitments have come second to the greatest show on earth: Carnival. Although Carnival is the height of the Trinidadian calendar year, it is experienced by Trinidadians is different ways. The parades of people you see on the streets in bikinis, beads and feathers (‘pretty mas’, or ‘pretty masquerade’) that resemble Brazilian Carnival, is a transformed version of Carnival that emerged in the 1980s as part of the state strategy to attract more tourism. It’s a strategy that has worked, thousands of tourists come each year paying up to £6000 to ‘play’ mas with the biggest and most popular groups, or as they’re locally known, bands. Prior to the 1980s, playing mas was a uniquely Trinidadian event that resembled the mix of the callalloo* nation. There were elements of theatre, Amerindian ritual and African dancing and drumbeats and costumes were embodiments of political commentary that mocked upper classes or foreign influences such as American seamen who were based in Trinidad in the Second World War. Many people tend to agree that mas had political potential and social commentary. But what of it today?

February has been a rich month for fieldwork as everybody has an opinion on Carnival. Common discourse and normative values emphasise that contemporary Carnival is vulgar, it’s not really Trinidadian, all the wining (a dance where the main movement is gyrating the hips) and carrying on is indecent. A lot of women agree with this view, but it is undeniable that each year, hundreds of thousands of Trinidadian women play mas. I have been discussing this with Dr Dylan Kerrigan at the University of the West Indies, a fellow anthropologist who has expertise on gender, masculinities and Carnival. We agree that Carnival has retained fractions of its potential for political subversion, perhaps now, not along the lines of race and class, but along the lines of gender. Carnival is the month of the year when a woman of any background, age and race can be extremely scantily clad, dance with whoever she likes and you don’t hear a peep from male onlookers or spectators. Yet, purchasing the space for freedom has an explicit economic dimension, paying for the pre-Carnival parties (fetes) and to play mas with big bands with their own food, drinks, portable bathrooms and security is an investment for a fun (safe) time. The demarcation of expensive fetes and bands makes sure that people of certain levels of society remain in their respective groupings. The one big contradiction to the prestige of going to expensive fetes and playing with big bands is that at this time of year, banks give special loans just for Carnival. People save money over a year (or two) or take out loans to visibly occupy spaces they don’t the rest of the year. Which brings me back to the ongoing theme of visibility.

I thought that if so much money is being spent on parties and costumes, surely this is the time of year Facebook would be inundated with selfies and mirror shots. Carnival is the pinnacle of the year to be seen by others. With the prestige of fetes and bands, comes with being photographed. Danny Miller is currently doing an in depth study of one such photography company that takes photos in fetes and uploads them to social media and their own website, reminiscent of the society pages in newspapers and magazines. Trinidad is a small society with few print magazine publications. The biggest and most expensive bands publish their own magazines after Carnival, displaying photos of masqueraders on Carnival Monday or Tuesday. Anybody who plays mas with these bands could be potentially snapped for the magazine. The photos I have seen on Facebook of masqueraders have mostly been tagged by others. The extreme few selfies have been ‘before going out’ shots. I saw many people with camera phones on the day, but there is an etiquette of visibility that photos of you are posted by others. What is the point of being the show and being the spectacle for your own gaze, otherwise?

Contemporary society pages are now the pages of social media. Four major social photography companies regularly post photos of events they have photographed on Facebook and people can tag themselves. The brands of photographers and the brands of fetes and bands is another aspect of how Facebook is made Trinidadian, through emulating the society pages of print magazines.

*Callalloo: a local dish made of mixed vegetables and cooked together, but also a local idiom for the mixed culture of Trinidad.

Facebook and the vulnerability of the self

By Elisabetta Costa, on 7 February 2014

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

A social panic surrounding Facebook has arisen in my field-site in south-east Turkey: nasty cheaters use hacker applications to steal Facebook user names and passwords in order to damage people’s reputation!

The practice of stealing Facebook passwords to post shameful images and video, and swear words on other people’s walls seems to be quite common among young adults. Apparently the town is full of hacking applications that allows spiteful people to enter other Facebook pages and make unpleasant jokes. I met several people whose Facebook profile has been stolen and used to post nasty surprises that ruin their honour. And many young people are really afraid that such a thing can happen to them as well: “Facebook can be very dangerous” I’ve been told several times. I don’t know if hacking applications are really effective here in Dry Rock Town. But surely people continuously share common computers and smartphones, and probably forget to log out from their accounts, giving the opportunity to strangers and perfidious friends to commit these offences.

One of the most prevalent fears people have is that of losing control of their public image that can bring public disapproval. The public image on the Facebook wall can be seen as an extension of the person, but this in turn makes the person more vulnerable. Photos, images, thoughts, and private talks are all significant parts of the self that are “out there” and can be easily violated by others. A simple joke can indelibly violate the self: everybody in the large network of friends and acquaintances can potentially become a threat to the self by entering into its boundaries after having stolen a password. In the age of Facebook the borders of the self are extended, but at the same time more fragile and vulnerable. And when these borders of the self are vulnerable, honour can be shattered.

This moral panic surrounding Facebook reflects the anxiety related to the vulnerability of the self that Facebook has made more apparent. I really believe that traditional codes of honour and shame are given new life in the age of social media.

The Facebook wall as expression of traditional values

By Elisabetta Costa, on 11 November 2013

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

Photo by Elisabetta Costa

The inhabitants of Dry Rock Town in south-east Turkey have a mix of social, economic, geographical and ethnic backgrounds. The composition of the town is complex, beginning with a heterogeneous population that has lived here for decades and centuries. Additionally, different groups of rural and urban Kurds, Turks and Arabs came to live in the town more recently for different reasons, contributing to the expansion of the city. At the moment the main social differences of the inhabitants can be explained mainly as a consequence of different levels of urbanization. In fact we can see the people now living in Dry Rock Town as distributed along a continuum from more rural to more urban.

In the last weeks I have worked on the visual analysis of my informants Facebook posts and what has struck me most has been the homogeneity of their Facebook profiles. Although the differences existing in  real life between rural and urban people are evident, their Facebook visual materials look quite similar. It doesn’t matter if a woman or a man has grown up in the main city of the region or in a small village, and they have completely different life-styles. Their Facebook profiles have many things in common and their visual materials are not so different from each other. Traditional values of family, honour and women’s modesty are overtly represented.

For example, H. is a young Kurdish woman who works in a highly professional environment, grew up in a big city in southeast Turkey, has male friends, drinks alcohol in restaurants, and eventually will freely choose the person she marries. Her Facebook wall is not so different from the one of S., a woman in her early thirties who grew up in a small town, has very few relationships with non-family members, and that is married to a man who was chosen by her family. In both cases, relatives, family members and traditional habits surface as the main objects of the visual materials that appear on their Facebook walls. Pictures of weddings and family gatherings, and self-portraits with relatives are the most represented images.

The Facebook social network reproduces the social space of the village where there is no space for anonymity. On Facebook everybody is very careful to not damage their own reputation and that of the family because on Facebook everybody knows each other. The practices learned in the anonymous spaces of the big city disappear in the self-representation played out on Facebook. I refer specifically to habits and customs of urban women, such as hanging out with friends, coming home late at night, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and having intimate relationships before marriage, which are not represented at all on the Facebook wall.

But as written in a previous post, in contrast with the normativity of the public space, the private chats and the private messages of Facebook are exactly the opposite. People do secretly what they can’t do in the offline world: chatting with girls and boys, flirting, finding lovers, new friends and partners, getting in touch with foreigners, playing games, and being politically active.

Facebook and the body aesthetic in south-east Turkey

By Elisabetta Costa, on 9 October 2013

Female mannequin in shop in Turkey fieldsite

Female mannequin in shop in Turkey fieldsite

I have been looking at the Facebook photos of my friends in Dry Rock Town in south-east Turkey and I found very few pictures of overweight women, despite the fact that there are many in town. I can’t reduce the explanation of this fact simply to the presence of an ideal form of the thin body, because this exists in many other parts of the world where people post their pictures of fat bodies on Facebook.

As a way to meet new people and to do some exercise I started to go to one of the three local gyms of the neighborhood where I live. I discovered that the gym is a perfect place to understand the new social aesthetic norms of female and male bodies. Indeed in Dry Rock Town sport is usually portrayed as a way to shape the body, rather than being something worthy in itself. Women go to the gym only to lose weight, while men usually go the gym to do body-building and increase their muscles. I have been asked innumerable times why I was going to the gym as I was not fat, and I had the feeling that my answer “I like doing sport” has never really been understood.

In Dry Rock Town, as with many other parts of the world, the ideal body of the women has changed quite a lot in recent years. As many older men in my fieldsite told me, until few decades ago fatter women were appreciated and searched out by men, because they believed that such women could be more fertile and make more children. But now men are attracted by thin women and young women are obsessed with slim bodies and diet. I had a conversation with a sport trainer who displayed a particularly aggressive attitude towards fat women:

“I really hate fat women! They have never done any exercise during all their life; they just seat, cook and eat. And then all of a sudden they want to lose weight without any effort. I hate them!”

Another friend, a young Kurdish man, is used to making fun of Arab women because they are fat:

“They just know how to cook and eat. The stay at home all day, they clean, they make food and they eat! When they are 35 years old you can’t look at them anymore.”

In Dry Rock Town there are many overweight women as a consequence of a life style that restricts their opportunities to move freely and  have healthy life. In most cases, women sit at home, clean the house, cook, eat, look after the children and, sometimes, they go to work. But if in the past their daily-life habits were fitting the aesthetic social norms, now there is a clear discrepancy between these habits and the shape they tend to achieve, with the effect of creating deep fears and complexes among young women.

But being fat is not only about a physical appearance that does not correspond to the social norms. Being fat is associated with a “traditional” life-style, with old-fashioned habits, with backwardness. Here overweight women are the antithesis of modernity; in somehow they embed exactly what young men and women want to escape from. Facebook users in Dry Rock Town are usually the first generation of educated people, with high school or university degree, and they look towards a different life-style from those of their less educated and more “traditional” parents.

This aversion against the values embedded by weight happens in a place where Facebook is highly normative because it reflects the powerful normativity of a “traditional” Muslim society where people have to strictly follow specific social norms that define every single aspect of the daily life. But now Facebook extends this normativity to new domains: the strict normativity of the way people portray them online where specific aesthetic codes are followed with very few exceptions.

QQ & WeChat: a threat to marriage in China?

By Tom McDonald, on 24 September 2013

Photo by flowcomm (Creative Commons)

Photo by flowcomm (Creative Commons)

Writing in the 1970s, Margery Wolf noted the pressures faced by rural Chinese women when they married. Women would typically leave their home village, where they were well cared for by their own family, and move into their husband’s village. As outsiders in this new place, women were positioned at the very bottom of society. They had no social network and were faced with the very difficult task of having to form social connections with other women in the village who they believed they could trust in order to survive.

This old social phenomenon has taken a somewhat different spin with the advent of new social media in the small town and villages that make up our North China fieldsite. I have noticed that many women report their communication networks get smaller in adulthood. Particularly worth emphasising is that in many of the responses to our questionnaires, young women told me that they moved away from social networking once they got married. I have a hunch this may have something to do with important aspects of female morality and forms of exclusion from the public sphere. For example, it was very rare for women in our fieldsite to use their own photos as their avatars or in their QZone profiles, and many women practiced ‘locking’ access to some or all of their QZone albums (QZone does not offer the same fine-grained privacy controls seen in Facebook) with a security question to test their familiarity, such as ‘What is my name?’.

One such example came from Mrs Hu, a 30 year old married woman with a young son, who runs a shop in the town. She explained to me that social media use carries with it certain dangers. There was an occasion when one of her male ‘online friends’ (wangyou) sent her a QQ message saying: ‘I have changed a QQ number, add my other QQ number.’ She asked him why he wanted her to add the other number [havng a second QQ account can be a cause for suspicion]. He replied that it was ‘because my wife knows’ (yinwei wo laopo zhidao). She explained to me that this made her angry, because she had never met the man, and she told me she sent the man a message saying ‘I have no special connections with you, what does it matter if your wife knows?’. Following this occasion, she became far more careful with who she became friends with via social media, and even went to the trouble of reassigning the gender of her QQ and WeChat profiles to male in an effort to detract male strangers from ‘friending’ her.

While women in the town have tended to opt to more carefully control who they communicate with following marriage, and to limit their visibility on social networks, the situation is somewhat different for men – instead we tend to see a larger amount of social networking and media use amongst men once they get married.

Part of this may be down to a traditional expectation that men are supposed to earn money for the family, and therefore be spend more time outside home. There is a saying in Chinese that ‘women live on the inside, and men live on the outside’ (nv zhu nei, nan zhu wai). There is a common perception in my fieldsite that men need ‘connections’ (guanxi) and a wider set of connections in order to achieve this. Men are expected to be somewhat more ‘overtly expansive’ in relationships than women.

This is where social media comes in. It is becoming clear to me that one of the main differences between Chinese social media (QQ, WeChat) and their non-Chinese counterparts (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is that the Chinese social media appears to be much more strongly oriented towards making new friends, especially with strangers. However, as well as this fitting into the accepted ideal of socially extravert males, it also seems to be conducive to extra-marital affairs.

An example of this comes from Mr Wang, also in his thirties. I had heard from others that Wang was a particularly ‘chaotic’ person. One day I bumped into him sitting and chatting in a store. We became friends and added each other via WeChat’s ‘shake’ (yao-yi-yao) function. He told me that he only uses WeChat during the day, and avoids using it at night-time. “If my wife knows I use WeChat she will smash my phone” he told me with a smile.

In a society as concerned with marriage as China, it goes without saying that social media is having an enormous impact in transforming this social institutions. The two cases I have provided here are extreme ones, but I would say that here in the North China fieldsite many people seem to believe that social media can be especially damaging to marriage. Perhaps this is most forcefully proved by the fact that relatively few of our participants seem to communicate with their spouses via social media, instead preferring to call or even more rarely, text.